The Woman Who Fell to Earth - Rewrite
by Kammerice
Summary: After I was so thoroughly disappointed with Season 11, I've decided to rewrite it as well as I can.
1. Pre-Credits

Falling.

Brilliant.

I love falling.

No...wait...it's the other one.

Hate. I hate falling.

 _Hate is always foolish_.

Who said that? Sounds like someone I know. Or used to know. Used to be?

Still falling.

It might be foolish, but I really do hate falling. Somehow, though, I keep doing it.

Hang on. There's got to be something up here besides dark clouds and birds and...is that an aeroplane?

Brilliant!

Where they're going. Have they seen...?

Don't get distracted. Check the pockets. Maybe I packed something for my fall.

Sonic screwdriver. Useless at stopping falling objects.

Sunglasses? At night? They're sonic, too, aren't they? I remember a Scotsman saying that. Doesn't matter. Useless.

What's this?

Is that a...a...a Mondasian inertial dampener? Where'd that come from? Holding it makes me think of a short, bald man. Do all Mondasian inertial dampeners make people think of short, bald men?

Is this inertial dampener useful? There's something about it that makes me think...

Oh.

Oh!

If I can recalibrate the...the...what's the word?...the spinney bit, and offload the potential by...by doing the thing, then the inertia could be dampened.

Maybe the Sonic's not useless after all...


	2. Chapter 2

This was a terrible idea.

The bicycle saddle pinched in places Ryan didn't want to think about. He shifted his weight to ease the pressure, but kept both feet where they belonged: on the ground. Lifting them up would mean having to pedal, having to steer, having to watch where he was going...having to think of a million different things at once.

And if he could ride a bike just by thinking about it, then this would be no big deal.

But to ride a bike, he had to actually ride a bike. That was why he was at the top of a windy hill on an overcast Tuesday afternoon. Like almost everything in his life, the practical was much tougher than the theory. That was just one of the many thousands of joys of having developmental dyspraxia.

Something like one in ten kids suffered from some form of the condition or another. Sure, for some of them, it was so mild that they didn't even notice.

But for others, it was debilitating. It was for those kids that he was here. To show them that this stupid disorder wouldn't hold any of them back. If Ryan Sinclair could, at 19 years old, learn to ride a bike, then so could kids a lot younger than him.

Okay. Pep talk done. Let's do this.

He twisted to look back at Grace, his nan. She held his phone in landscape, camera aimed at him. "Ready when you are, sweetheart," she said, the screen.

"Start recording." He licked his lips and plastered a wide grin on his face.

Nan gave a thumbs up.

"Hi, everyone!" Ryan waved at the camera. "Welcome back to 'Ryan's Life'. Today, I'm gonna do something that's terrified me since I was a kid: ice-skating." He paused, hoping his subscribers would be chuckling. "Seriously, though, riding a bike has scared me for years. I've never been able to get the hang of it, no matter how much my Nan tries. I wanted to make this video to show you how hard this is, even for grown-ups."

He looked away, eyeing his course down the steep path towards Graham, his nan's husband. Riding a bike wasn't the only difficult thing Ryan had to contend with today. But he wasn't going to explain Graham's weird desire to be his granddad to his subscribers. There were plenty of other videos online about dealing with strangers in the home.

Taking a deep breath, he turned back to Nan. "I've made plenty of videos about how I've managed to do something, but I've never shown the times I've failed. So..." He smiled, but worry weighed down the corners of his mouth. "So, today you get to see what happens when stuff doesn't work. Ready, Nan?"

Nan nodded over the top of his phone.

Ryan sat properly on the bike and adjusted his helmet. He licked his lips again. "Ready, Graham?" he called down the hill.

"Ready, son!" the reply echoed back.

Ryan ground his teeth and throttled the handlebars. "I'm not your son," he said under his breath so the camera and Nan wouldn't hear. Then, louder, he said, "Ready, Ryan? Ready, Ryan."

He pushed off. Legs splayed, he hurtled down the hill.

"Pedal, Ryan!" Nan shouted.

The pedals spun faster and faster. His feet couldn't find them. "C'mon!"

The tip of one trainer landed on a pedal. Yes! With one foot in position, getting the other would be easier.

At the bottom of the hill, Graham was waving his arms. "Steer, Ryan, steer!"

Ryan wrestled with the handlebars. The front wheel veered back toward the middle of the path. Still one leg trailed.

"Halfway, love!" Nan's voice was almost drowned by the rushing wind. "You're doing it!"

Ryan allowed himself a massive smile. He _was_ doing it! He was actually riding a...

The wayward pedal slammed into the back of his leg. The entire bike jerked. The front wheel lifted, twisted and fell back to the path at an awkward angle. The bike pitched to the left, bucking Ryan to the right.

Eyes squeezed shut, he flew through the air. The path rushed to meet him. His helmet crashed against the rough ground, then his shoulder. He tumbled in a tangle of arms and legs until at last coming to a painful stop several yards away from his bike.

Footsteps ran toward him from either direction.

"You okay, son?"

Eyes still closed, Ryan counted back from ten to keep from saying something his nan wouldn't like. "Yeah, fine." He opened his eyes.

Nan and Graham stood over him. The phone was trained on him, recording every moment of his complete failure.

Nan pointed at the camera and motioned for him to say something.

He sighed and looked into the lens. "I reckon you all know how this feels." He groaned as he pushed himself up to a seated position. "But it's not just you. It's never just you. You're never alone. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that you can't let this hold you back. You've got to get up, get back on the bike, and try again."

Wincing, he stood up, ignoring Graham's outstretched hand. "Let's go again." He limped toward the fallen bike.


	3. Chapter 3

The car window wasn't just cracked. It was properly smashed.

Yaz leaned closer to examine the point of impact. Blunt object, round. Golf ball sized, but a golf ball wouldn't do the kind of damage she was looking at. Not unless it was fired from a cannon. No, this was something else.

Something like...

"...a hammer!"

Yes, something like a hammer.

Wait...

She whirled. Her police cap threatened to fly from her head, but she kept it in place with sheer force of will. "Oi!" she yelled at the two women in the middle of the street. "Back off now, the pair of you!"

The pair stepped apart. "But she..." one said at the same time the other started "You don't..."

Yaz held her hand up. "I don't care. Do you two not have better things to do than have a fight about parking spaces? I know I do. There's crime - actual crime - I could be dealing with."

The women glanced at one another, then turned their burning faces to the ground. They mumbled apologies like schoolchildren.

Yaz pointed at one woman. "Now you're going to pay for the damage to the car. And you–" her finger tracked to the other woman, "-are going to promise never to park there again. And once that's done, we'll agree that parking here is awful and that the council should do something. How's that sound?"

More mumbled replies, but it was the best she was going to get.

"Great." She started for her double-parked police car. "If I have to come back here, so help me, I'll throw you both in jail."

She slammed the car door and headed back to the station by the most fuel efficient route she knew.

The station was a squat grey building in the middle of a council estate. A smattering of police cars filled the spaces in front. There was an empty spot almost at the front doors. As Yaz drove toward it, she caught sight of PS Sunder standing in front of the station's main doors. He took a bit of apple as he watched her park.

"Trainee Constable Khan," he said when she got out of her car, "can I have a word?"

Trainee perhaps, but Yaz knew a rhetorical question when she heard one. "Yes, Sarge." She approached, ready to follow him into the building.

But Sunder stayed where he was, chewing his apple like an angry cow. "Where are we, Trainee Constable Khan?"

"Sheffield, sir." Yaz kept her answer from becoming a question. A couple of other uniformed officers passed them, eyeing her with a mixture of sympathy and exasperation.

"That's what I thought. Is Judge Dredd a member of the police force in Sheffield?" He took another bite.

"No, sir."

"Then why is it, Trainee Constable Khan, that I've just had a complaint from a woman in Grimesthorpe about, and I quote, 'Little Miss Judge Dredd' who threatened her with jail time after her car was vandalised in a legal space on the street?" He pointed the apple core at her as he spoke.

Yaz forced her hands not to ball into fists. "The situation was more complicated than that, sir. If I could just explain..."

Sunder's face softened but he cut her off with a shake of his head. "Yaz, I get that you're frustrated. You're a smart kid, but you're still learning. You're going to have to accept that being bored is part of the job. You can't go running around by yourself, dishing out the law however you see fit."

"Sir, if I could just..."

"Two years' probation, Yaz. Probabtion's two years for everyone. You've got less than six months of it left." Sunder threw his finished apple in a nearby bin. "Trust me. If you keep your head down, the time'll pass soon enough and you can get on with proper policing. For now, though, go join PC Wright on patrol."

Without waiting for a reply, Sunder marched into the police station.

Yaz stared at his back.

This wasn't fair. She was ready for 'proper policing' now.

Why couldn't any of them see it?


End file.
